"English poet and playwright William Shakespeare created characters that are among the richest and most humanly recognizable in all of literature. Yet Shakespeare understood human personality in the terms available to his age—that of the now-discarded theory of the four bodily humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm. These four humors were understood to define people’s physical and mental health, and to determine individual’s personality, as well. "And there's the Humor of it": Shakespeare and the Four Humors explores the language of the four humors and their influence in Shakespeare’s plays."
To learn more about the exhibition, visit the website.
(https://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/about/exhibition/shakespeare.html)
How Shakespeare Cleaned His Teeth and Cromwell Treated His Warts by 
A Midsummer Night's Dream by 
The Tempest by 
Macbeth by 
Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England by
Susan Sontag in Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors points to the vital connection between metaphors and bodily illnesses, though her analyses deal mainly with modern literary works. This collection of essays examines the vast extent to which rhetorical figures related to sickness and health-metaphor, simile, pun, analogy, symbol, personification, allegory, oxymoron, and metonymy-inform medieval and early modern literature, religion, science, and medicine in England and its surrounding European context. In keeping with the critical trend over the past decade to foreground the matter of the body and the emotions, these essays track the development of sustained, nuanced rhetorics of bodily disease and health " physical, emotional, and spiritual. The contributors to this collection approach their intriguing subjects from a wide range of timely, theoretical, and interdisciplinary perspectives, including the philosophy of language, semiotics, and linguistics; ecology; women's and gender studies; religion; and the history of medicine. The essays focus on works by Dante, Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton among others; the genres of epic, lyric, satire, drama, and the sermon; and cultural history artifacts such as medieval anatomies, the arithmetic of plague bills of mortality, meteorology, and medical guides for healthy regimens.
Distracted Subjects by 
Medicine Matters in Five Comedies of Shakespeare by 
Shakespeare and the Practice of Physic by 
The Mind According to Shakespeare by 
The Bard on the Brain by 
Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body by "And there's the humor of it": Shakespeare and the Four Humors
(October 23, 2017 - December 2, 2017)
Bodies in Play: Shakespeare's Depiction of Illness
October 24, 2017 at 7:00 p.m.
Marcia Eppich-Harris, Ph.D., Department of English
Diane Prenatt, Ph.D., Department of English
Two English Department faculty members gave a presentation in conjunction with the NLM exhibit. The presentation explored medicine during Shakespeare's lifetime and looked at the portrayal of illness within his work.
Interested in watching the presentation? Access it through MUShare, our institutional repository. You can also find the paper Dr.Eppich-Harris wrote for the presentation there.
"And there's the humor of it": Shakespeare and the Four Humors posters displayed in the Evans Center atrium.
The presentation took place in Lecture Hall 2 on October 24th at 7 p.m.
Diane Prenatt, Ph.D. discussing the history of medicine.
Marcia Eppich-Harris, Ph.D. discussing the War of the Roses.
Department of English faculty members, Marcia Eppich-Harris, Ph.D., and Diane Prenatt, Ph.D., pose for a photo after their presentation.
The library put the complete works of Shakespeare and all the Shakespeare related DVDs on display with the exhibition.
More library resources related to the traveling exhibition displayed near the Circulation Desk.